I see that some people in the US are describing the effects of Hurricane Katrina as “our tsunami“. Now I don’t want to minimise what has happened in New Orleans over the last few days in any way, but lets get some bloody proportion here. Look at the numbers. Current estimates of deaths caused by… Continue reading “Our Tsunami”
Month: August 2005
Hardware Catalogue
Based on a conversation in the pub last week, here’s a list of the kinds of computer hardware that geeks often own, rent or otherwise have access to. Listed (approximately in descending order of size. I don’t have all of these. Which do you own. Have I missed any? External web server – often a… Continue reading Hardware Catalogue
Gmail
I just noticed that the number of Gmail invitations that I’ve got to give away has doubled to 100. If you want an invitation and I know who you are, then just send me an email and I’ll fire one off to you.
Public Unaware of RSS
It’s good to see something like this every once in a while. It’s easy to sit there in a little geek cocoon and assume that everyone out there on the interweb is using all the same time-saving tools as you are. But as this article from The Register shows, that’s often not the case. It… Continue reading Public Unaware of RSS
American Dates
Why are American companies so determined to confuse the rest of the world with their illogical way of writing dates? Yesterday I got an email from register.com reminding me that one of my domains needed to be renewed. They said that the current registration expired on “12/07/2005”. “Bloody hell,” I thought, “that’s over a month… Continue reading American Dates
New Phone
My Orange contract expired last week so I was in the market for a new phone. I had my eye on a Nokia 6630 as the Orange web site said that I could get one for £30. But when I called Orange to arrange it thy said that it would actually cost me £150. This… Continue reading New Phone
A Levels
So my stepdaughter was just about to leave the house to go up to college to pick up her A level results when the post arrived. And it included a letter for her from UCAS. It contains confirmation of her university place. Which rather spoils the surprise of going off to college and picking up… Continue reading A Levels
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday. In general it’s a decent version of the story. But let’s not forget that it’s a children’s book so the plot isn’t exactly complex :) However, there was one thing that really annoyed me about it. And that was the blatant Americanisation of the dialogue. The book… Continue reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Please Forget Me
The previous entry about Rojo (and, in particular, Aristole’s comment) reminds me of big complaint that I have about pretty much all web sites – which is that they like to make it incredibly difficult to close your account with them. Oh, I understand completely why that is. If you’ve registered with a web site… Continue reading Please Forget Me
Rojo.com – How Not To Send Email
Rojo is an RSS reader. I tried it out for a week or so last year, but soon decided that I still prefered Bloglines and forgot about Rojo. That is, I forgot about them until a couple of weeks ago. Then I got an email from them. They had decided that they would start to… Continue reading Rojo.com – How Not To Send Email